Turn a PDF screenplay back into a Final Draft file.

Drop in a PDF and download a .fdx you can open and keep writing. This is the hard direction, because a PDF does not record what a paragraph is, so read the note below on how it manages. It runs inside this page and your script is never uploaded.

Drop your PDF here

You can also pick a file from your computer.

PDF with a text layer. Nothing is uploaded.

How a PDF gets read back

A PDF records ink, not meaning

It knows that a word sits three inches from the left edge of page forty. It does not know that the word is a character cue. So the converter measures the columns your script actually uses and reads the format back out of them. It recognises those columns by what they contain rather than by a fixed distance, because Final Draft, Fade In and a Word template all put dialogue in slightly different places and a fixed distance gets one of them wrong.

What it repairs on the way

Page numbers, headers and footers come out. Scene numbers running down both margins come out. A speech that a page break had cut in two is rejoined, and so is an action paragraph. What it cannot repair is a PDF with no text layer: a scan is a picture of a script, and there is nothing in it to read.

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Questions about converting a PDF

I write my own films in Google Docs, so I built the tools I kept wishing existed.

Ask me something
How accurate is it?
On a PDF exported from Final Draft, Fade In, Highland or Screenplay Editor, it is close to exact, because those exports place their columns cleanly. On a PDF that was typed by hand in a word processor, expect to fix a few paragraphs. The tool tells you what it found before you download anything, so you can see for yourself.
My PDF is a scan. Will it work?
No. A scanned script is an image, so there is no text to read. You would need to run it through optical character recognition first, and the result usually needs more repair than it saves.
Does it keep my title page?
Yes, when the PDF has one. A first page holding only a handful of centred lines is read as a title page, and you can leave it out with the checkbox above.
Is my screenplay uploaded anywhere?
No. The PDF is read inside this page, by your own browser. It is never sent anywhere and nothing is stored.

The other conversions

Fountain to Final Draft

Your .fountain file, typed paragraph by paragraph into a .fdx.

Final Draft to Fountain

Your .fdx as plain text you can still read in twenty years.

PDF to Fountain

A PDF read back into plain Fountain.

Final Draft to Google Docs

Your .fdx in a Doc that already has the right margins.

Fountain to Google Docs

Your .fountain in a Doc that already has the right margins.

The converter itself

Every format in, every format out, on one page.